Trial date set for Woodridge man accused of killing dad with weed trimmer

Clifford WardTribune reporter

A Woodridge man is scheduled to stand trial next month on charges that he allegedly beat his father to death with a weed trimmer.

DuPage County Judge Robert Kleeman on Thursday set Jan. 14 as the trial date for Yashesh Desai, 22, charged with the August 2011 murder of his father, Sanjiv J. Desai.

The proceeding will be a stipulated bench trial, which means both DuPage prosecutors and defense attorneys will agree in writing about what investigators discovered the night Desai, 47, was killed. That will leave the judge to decide the main remaining issue: the mental state of the accused at the time of the alleged crime.

Both sides have had psychologists conduct evaluations of Desai, and both reports concluded that he was insane when he allegedly killed his father, Assistant State’s Attorney Helen Kapas said.

Desai was taken into custody in the early morning hours of Aug. 14, 2011, outside the family’s Plover Court home after Woodridge police received a panicked 911 call from a family member.

Inside the residence, police found a weed trimmer, broken in half, in the living room. They found the victim in an adjacent computer room, lying on a futon and dead from massive head trauma, according to court documents.

The son was taken into custody and later gave a disjointed statement to police, which touched on topics like Godzilla, Turks, and what Desai described as the “need for 23 million soldiers,” authorities said. He had been seeing a psychiatrist and had been prescribed medicine usually taken for a major depressive disorder, according to court records

The former University of Illinois student had been asked to leave the Champaign campus in 2010 after he reportedly threatened another student with a knife and was charged with aggravated assault.

He was ruled unfit for trial in November 2011, about a month after he attacked a DuPage County corrections officer who was among several jailers trying to remove Desai from his cell so it could be cleaned. Desai bit the officer’s finger hard enough to break it, authorities said.

Desai spent six months at the Chester Mental Health Center before he was declared mentally fit in May and returned to DuPage County to await trial.